So the idea is to start a collaborative group – create a brand that small agencies could associate with, something they can fall back and deliver under. We aim to get around obstacles that make it difficult to the smaller player. For example, you might have a client that likes your service and wants to work with you but gives you opportunities that you can’t resource because it’s outside of your sector. With IRG, you can pass it on to another agency in the group, deliver your client service and still get a share of the revenue.

Likewise if you have a strong candidate, but no vacancy to put him forward to, you can market him out to the wider network – providing a greater service to your candidate, but also giving you a chance to get a revenue share from him.

So… aside from sharing leads & candidates, what else do you offer to members?
We have our own social network – IRG Socialise – which we have built ourselves from scratch. Members can use this to find each other, post messages and advertise vacancies or offer collaborations.

We’re looking at getting discounts from services – job boards, legal services, recruitment software and so on. One thing small agencies get penalized on, is overheads. If they are looking to buy access to a service, then because they can’t buy bulk, they often have to sign up for full service price because they can’t leverage volume. When you join IRG, we would buy for our members and they would invoice us for usage, with discounts being passed directly onto to our members. The big agencies have these advantages, so we want to generate those advantages and pass them onto the smaller companies.

Why smaller recruiters?
Because there’s a totally different culture between smaller agencies and the big corporates. When you’re owner managed business, it’s your business and every client and every candidate matters to you. You can’t play the numbers game like an agent in a big corporate. The clients and candidates can see true accountability and customer care from the small agency recruiter. We cannot hide and will typically provide a much higher level of service than you would find from a big corporate agency.

HR generally has a very negative view of the recruitment. My question to them would be, where they get that impression? Is it from the large agencies, or have they worked with small agencies? I would argue that they get that impression in large part from the larger agencies, – they are the ones who cold call the most, they are the ones that are KPI driven, they are the ones who are staffed full of young people who may have a need to make a quick buck, and don’t think of recruitment as job. Our members are all agency owners and for us, this is our livelihood, this is our career. It’s what we want to do, not something that we do because we have debts to pay off.

Confirm this: IRG doesn’t trade as a recruiter?
Yes, that’s true. We do have brands that trade as recruiters, but what we really want to do is support the agencies that do the recruiting.

What’s your view on Social Media vis a vis recruitment agencies?
We see a climate in the future where a lot of recruiters will want to set up on their own. In the past, recruiters only had two options – work for a big recruiter and secure the benefits of infrastructure and brand but lose control over the service they deliver and the value they can extract from their time. Or they set up their own, at high cost and high risk and do it all from scratch. Social media – especially tools like LinkedIn – releases individual recruiters from being dependent on a corporate database. With IRG they now also have infrastructure, network and support to quickly get up and running as an owner managed business – and trade on an equal footing with the corporates they are leaving behind.

How do you make your money?
It’s a completely free service for our members. We are not a trade body. There are no members fees, no anything. We intend to generate revenue from leveraging out buying power to secure discounts on services, and in promoting services to our members by other suppliers who have best of breed for the small agency recruiter.

How long to til world conquest?
We’ve got plans for being a global operation. We plan to have agency networks across the globe, and have already started expanding outside of the UK, into the Irish Republic. We are aiming to change recruitment for the better – small agencies have a quality driven MO and we’re here to make sure that they have a chance to win against the big corporate recruiters.

Thanks Sean, sounds like a plan.
A pleasure Wise Man Say, speak soon.

Thanks to Sean O’Donoghue, UK Chairman of Independent Recruiting Group. Find out more on http://www.irg-uk.com/ and follow the company on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/IRGUK

Wise Man Say helps recruiters use Social Media. Contact me on 0207 739 9358 or email on hung.lee@wisemansay.co.uk for more information

1. The Hero Drops The Bomb

2. The Boss and the Ex Employee
Within hours, both an ex-employee and current Managing Director of the recruitment business accused of malpractice comment and trade barbs. This, it’s fair to say, we don’t often see.

3. The Agitator
The crowd, roused by the prospect of some serious action, agitates for more

4. The Appeal To Authority
Our hero ups the ante, invoking industry body Recruitment & Employers Confederation informing them of one of their members business practice.

5. The Genius With A Solution That Everyone Ignores
It’s clear that this stage, that solutions are not required, as mob mentality takes over the thread

6. Shit – As Any Schoolkid Knows – Spreads
Accusations escalate – others come forward with corroborating reports support the initial accusation of industry bad practice. Astoundingly, it appears the REC had already been informed about this business malpractice from this organisation, with the implication that nothing had been done about it.

7. The Joker
A bit of light relief is an opportunity to good to ignore. It’s pretty good joke, and a maybe damn fine idea

8. The Philosopher
Religion was always going to come into it. Glad to see it’s Budha

9. The Smart Arse
There is always one

10. The Conspiracy Theorist
And one of these. To be fair, another good joke

11. The Escalation
Things can only go one way now….

12. The Gods Are Watching
God gives a sign to the Israelites – praise be someone cares.

13. No Cold Calls Today
It’s fair to say the UK recruitment industry has pretty much ground to halt by now.

14. The End?
Not on your life.

What have learned from this scandal in the recruitment industry?

1. It’s Brave To Be The Whistle Blower
As we’ve know already (see Manning, Bradley), blowing the whistle on malpractice carries with it the risk of uncertainty of outcome. At the moment, we do not yet know how this will unfold, for any of the protagonists, commentators, industry bodies or indeed, bloggers involved in this case. What we do know, that it’s a brave move to go public with information of the type Daniel produced. His widespread endorsement by the industry suggests that this is something we all recognize.

2. Recruiters Are Really, REALLY Pissed Off With Cowboy Bad Practice
It’s clear that there is an awareness of how our industry is perceived, and a frustration that comes from not being able to do anything about it. Until now.

3. We All Love A Scandal
‘…it’s better than War and Peace!’, quipped one industry wit. Yes, indeed it is. Nothing creates a stir more than a scandal in an industry we belong to, and it takes no more than a few names being named before we all become gossips over the fence, spreading the word through the recruitment village.

4. Mob Rules On The Social Web
It was interesting to note that the one or two updates that counseled solutions were completely ignored in favour of the foaming-at-the-mouth calls for the head of the accused. We’d become a digital lynch mob the Daily Mail would be proud of, giddy at the breaking of taboo, and continued with calls for ever more severe sanction. Perhaps, from this episode, we can all understand a little more why innocents were once burnt upon the stake.

5. Social Media Is Bad For The Bad Guys
Pretending to be a candidate in order to solicit business intelligence is not mythology in the recruitment business – we all know it, been on the end of it, seen some of us do it, and one or two, like our unfortunate friend yesterday, might have actually routinely practiced it. What is new is that social media allows for this bad practice to be captured, spread by the community and be preserved for posterity, because make no mistake, this thread and the conversations already beginning to circulate around it, are here to stay. There is already evidence that the employer in question has lost business, and one can guess that as the story itself becomes myth, that the damage to brand – individual and corporate – may be irreparable.

6. Recruiters Urgently Need To Understand Social Media
It’s not bullshit to say that social media changes the game for recruiters. We’ve seen a young mans’ career, and perhaps the company he’s employed by, ruined, as a result of what happened yesterday. Recruiters urgently need to understand that legacy practice – good or bad – can no longer be seamlessly practiced in a world where conversations and actions can be digitalized, captured and shared. There’s a reason why it’s called ‘dying in the ditch’. You die.

Let’s flip this around over the other way – what if there was good news spread today instead of bad – what impact for your business, and maybe your career? Have a think about that, and start making it a priority to teach yourself and your consultants about the socialized world we live in now.

Wise Man Say helps Recruiters, HR and Job Seekers use Social Media. Contact me on 0207 739 9358 or email on hung.lee@wisemansay.co.uk for more information

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1. Risk To Productivity

This is a classic. You’ve heard your boss say it, and you’ve probably said it or thought it yourself. If I let my guys on Facebook they will just play Mafia Wars all day.

It’s an easy picture to imagine – valued employees abandoning their objectives and getting sucked into a wormhole of status updates, photo tagging & online chat. Thankfully, it’s also propaganda, or at the very least, a failure of imagination. There is simply no evidence to back up the case that allowing access to social media sites degrades ‘productivity’ – not in the wider economy, and not in the recruitment industry. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence to suggest the contrary.

Think about it in terms of our business. Do you know of another industry that is more results driven than ours? We are obsessively concerned with sales objectives – so much so that it actually a problem for us when we need to think laterally or retool to adapt to change. We are so concerned about hitting our numbers because we literally depend on them – you know, for food – and it is preposterous to assume that any but the most demotivated of employees would be sidetracked in this way by access social media sites.

Workforce productivity is a management & hiring issue, not a social media one. Restricting access to some of the most relevant information sources for recruitment is communicating a message that you do not respect or trust your staff, or, in fact, give them the tools to do the job. Recruitment is a simple game, and, whilst it’s certainly not easy, it is relatively simple to manage. Make placements, make money, keep job. No placements, no money, no job. Where is the risk?

2. Risk of Bad PR

We’ve all heard the horror stories. In fact, we’re still hearing them as companies of all stripes continue to under-invest in training staff on the use of social media, and / or palm off the management of it to its most junior members or interns that probably aren’t even on the payroll. The technical term for this type of corporate approach is……..half arsed. Companies want all the benefits of social media – increased buzz, greater customer engagement, ‘free’ PR, Marketing & Inbound sales – but without the work required to understand and organize around it. There is no great technical solution to this; if you want social play, you have to put the time in – get outside help if you need it – and train yourself and your staff on what social media can do to, and for, the business. The only way you can mitigate against Bad PR is to raise your staff to an acceptable level of competence or hand the keys over to people that have bought into your business and have already built that expertise elsewhere. I’ll give you a hint: that’s almost never the intern

3. Risk To Corporate Data Leakage

Information that recruiters have traditionally held close is bleeding out everywhere
as candidates, contractors & clients tweet who they are, update what they are doing and share what they want or need next. You can argue that Socializing Your Recruitment Business is simply going to contribute to this ongoing leakage of corporate data. I wouldn’t disagree with you if you did. However, the idea that you can capture and lock data into a database that no one else can access is rapidly losing it’s resonance with reality. That information is already out and it isn’t going back any time soon.

We return to investing in staff and training them to understand which topics are in or out of bounds for social communication. As a business, you also need to review your contracts of employment and ensure that your standard clauses cover social media usage. In the long run, it’s not feasible to keep information off the web when the real owners of that information – the candidates. contractors and clients – are not bound by any legal contracts that you design. Our industry business model has changed in quite a fundamental way, and we recruiters need to move up the value chain and trade on something more than just knowing where the jobs are and who might be available to do them.

4. Risk of Social Media Ownership

Who Owns Your LinkedIn Connections? I once asked, in an earlier, equally unread post. I didn’t have the answer then and I don’t have it now. Legal precedent has already been set in the UK by a court case won by Hays in 2008, but it remains unclear how the ruling was enforced and how practicable it would be to work out it’s implications.

Like the leakage of Corporate Data, this is happening whether you Socialize Your Recruitment Business or not. At some point in the near future, you will come across a situation where there is a conflict between Employer & Employee over ownership of social media content.

As a manager of a recruitment business, it is absolutely critical that you allocate the appropriate resources to the tasks, especially when it comes to creating online identities to the business. A classic example might be your LinkedIn Company Group – who owns that? The company the group is about, or the individual you tasked to create it, who – of course – has now left to work for your main competitor? A quick glance at LinkedIn’s terms of usage might scare you shitless.

So get your house in order and take this seriously. Spreadsheets can be looked at by accountants & your holiday can be booked by your spouse. Your priority for now is to secure your digital assets and ensure that they belong to your business – you’ve got most at stake, so guess who needs to do it?

5. Risk of Doing Nothing

It must be pretty obvious by now why so many recruiters prefer not to deal with Social Media – it’s a real headache. With all these risks attached, it seems safer to live the cautious life and have nothing at all to do with it. But the price we pay for peace is a heavy one, because the risks outlined above are not contingent upon your action or inaction. They will happen whether you like them or not, whether you see them or not, whether you deal with them or not. Your only choice is to be an actor or be acted on.

There is more:

What about the capabilities your company loses by not socializing? Your consultants need to know how to build Talent Networks, how to use Location based sourcing techniques, how to build Attraction Marketing strategies. By ignoring social media, you run the risk of deskilling your staff on the skills they need most to stay ahead of the competition in a constantly evolving space.

What opportunities are not getting because you are not visible on the social web? Experienced buyers of recruitment services are not waiting by the phone for your fortuitously timed cold call. They have other means of sourcing suppliers, conducting due diligence, and making decisions on evidence they see on the social web. By not being visible there, you run the risk of missing this potential business, and worse, not even knowing that it was ever there in the first place.

What about your competition? Have you thought how they may harm you if you leave your digital assets unclaimed? Brand jacking is a phenomenon that has yet to gain traction in the UK recruitment industry, but it will soon and once it takes off, there will be a corporate war in which the reach of the law is uncertain, and the consequences for currently successful businesses may be profound.

Conclusion
Understand this: Socializing Your Recruitment Business is risky. It will move you and your business well out of your comfort zone and for recruiters especially, it will involve business practice that is in many ways counter intuitive to what we have always known. However, the risks of doing nothing far out way those of getting involved and joining the conversation on the social web. In the end, the biggest risk you can run is to do nothing at all.

Want to know more?

Wise Man Say helps agency & in-house recruiters understand how to use social media to find candidates & acquire clients. Strategy, Implementation, Support & Training. Call on 020 7 739 9358 or email on hung.lee@wisemansay.co.uk

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And the first step of the first stage is…….

1. Stop What You Are Doing

Right now, please. Because I’m saddened to report there’s a good chance you’re fucking things up. It’s true the social web is distinguished by having few ‘rules’ governing behaviour; but it’s equally clear that there are widely held ‘values’ that recruiters often do not understand, and frequently contravene. It’s not our fault – we come from a culture where the predominate mode of online public discourse is posting job adverts; it’s going to take us a while to learn that whilst you can distribute jobs this way, it’s generally not the way to go on the social web.

We’ve all seen examples of this – the LinkedIn status updates ‘Now looking for yada yada yada’ (in Prague, usually). Or the tweets that don’t have any Human in them, just Job Title, Link, #hashtags #jobsearch #ITJobs #hire #etfuckingcetera.

You already know yourself that this does not work.

Perhaps what you don’t know is how bad this actually is for you. You can’t grow your Twitter following, add any new Fans or generate any positive buzz for you or the company you represent. And those 500+ LinkedIn connections you have? Because of your chronic overshare, half of them will have hidden your status updates without you even knowing about it. So the first thing we need to do – before we do anything else – is stop ‘bad recruiter behaviour’. Diving in is great – but there’s really no point if all you’re going to do is piss in the pool.

2. Know Where You Are

Yeah, I know – introspection is for wimps. We, in the recruitment industry, pre selected for our thick skins, and thicker skulls, rarely ‘do’ introspection, and if we ever did, we’d have it hammered out of us through daily drilling on dialing 9 for an outside line. We crack on, move on, make another call – right? It’s an approach that works when the methods are established, there is evidence for results and all you have to do is get better at doing the task. It does not work so well when you are trying to learn something new.

The first step towards knowledge is to know what you don’t. So recruiters – companies and individuals – need to lose the introspecto-phobia and understand where they are in the social web, in terms of knowledge, assets, resources and time. The answer may be that you know nothing at all. Good. At least you know that. But it is from that point that you can plan for what you need to learn, and budget for for it accordingly.

This may be uncomfortable stuff for many recruiters, trained as we are to always go go go. But having already stopped what we’re doing, it makes sense to take a good look round before starting off again.

3. Know Where Everyone Else Is

Ace recruiter

You’d be surprised where they aren’t. Some of the biggest recruitment companies in the UK have close to zero social media presence. In 2011. How is this possible? I think it must be very rich people in charge of very big businesses being overly satisfied with how fucking very rich they are. Only a theory. For you, this is not an excuse to fall back, but an opportunity to step forward. Basic market analysis will tell you where the opportunities are and how quickly you need to move to take advantage of them. Needless to say, the settings on that speed dial range from ‘now’ to ‘NOW!” to ‘too late’.

You can think of it like this; for recruiters, the social web is still pretty much virgin territory. It’s panning for gold in California in ‘49. You don’t have to have the biggest pan, or even be any good at looking for gold. There is just this ridiculously unfair, and permanent advantage in getting there first.

4. Know Where You Want To Be

I guessed you were panning for gold. Maybe you were more of an oil man. Whichever is the case, the steps we’ve taken so far should reveal to you what it is you want to do. Being A N Other Recruiter selling ‘a great service and even better CV’s’ is unlikely to put you ahead. Those of you who read my blog (Happy Mother’s Day Ma!) will be aware of my feelings/thoughts about vertical or horizontal markets – pick wisely and head for them, aim to be the best connector in that sector or specialism. For those of who you criticise this idea fuck you, understand that there are many ways to specialise other than strict technical verticals. You can specialise recruiting for a broader range of skills in a smaller geographical area. You can focus on a particular size of company, or companies within a particular supply chain. In fact, you can do anything you please, but make sure that it’s a niche that you can deliver and have a chance at becoming the best at delivering for. You will find that social channels work best when your target audience is narrow, but deep.

5. Know What Good Looks Like

Confession: I stole that line from Roger Philby. If you want some real insight, get off this blog and read his. Know What Good Looks Like. This is about understanding what success for you – recruiting superstar – is going to be on the social web. What do you want to achieve? And what does that look like? Without a vision of that destination, the risk of being distracted and going off tangent increases substantially. And that’s not forgetting the morale factor that will keep you going when the going seems tougher than is worth it. And make no mistake, Social Media is tough. Even Twitter itself accepts that the typical pattern of usage is sign up, get excited, don’t see the point & then leave.

You can go down many levels of detail and / or quantification in describing your success on the social web. It could be a simple follower/friend/connection count. Maybe it’s a %age of referral business generated by Word of Mouth amplified through social channels. Or maybe it’s just that fuzzy feeling you get when you realise that you really, truly get it.

Conclusion
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am generally an act first, regret-in-your-own-good-time type of guy. But a little bit of thinking, research & visualisation before you engage in the social web can save you time, labour and money. Not to mention avoiding mistakes that can seriously damage your brand and derail everything you are trying to do.

Want to know more? You know what do

Wise Man Say helps agency & in-house recruiters understand how to use social media to find candidates & acquire clients. Strategy, Implementation, Support & Training. Call on 020 7 739 9358 or email on hung.lee@wisemansay.co.uk

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You login. You type words, check boxes, click ‘Search’ and – as if by the magic – there would be your call list of candidates. At the time, it seemed ridiculously easy. Way too easy. And yet there it was, onscreen, in black and white: results. There was to be more; soon, you were able to save the search you inputted and have it run automatically for you, cutting the time it takes to do the typing. If you were tired of doing even that, there was the job posting function, which by dint of a 250 word advert, would send candidates to your inbox and release you from doing any kind of searching at all.

Job boards quickly became my best friend. And after briefly flirting with the idea of dis-intermediating the industry, they quickly became the best friends of recruiters everywhere. But like all the best friendships, the convenience that comes with them is bought at a price you have to pay at some point. And my fellow recruiters, I need to tell you, that point is now.

1. Recruiters Have Been De-Skilled

We forgot how to ‘source’ candidates. I would argue that anyone who entered the recruitment industry in the UK in the late 90’s and throughout the past decade, probably never had the chance to learn. The very convenience (and admittedly, at first, efficacy) of job board searching / posting meant that there was rarely reason enough to do anything other than recruit in this way. Without being aware of it, we became farmers – seeding the Internet with job ads and harvesting the return when the responses came in, instead of hunters, who would go out and actively target individuals to recruit. Companies got lazy too. I was never trained to ‘source’. No one taught me how to use Boolean operators. I didn’t even know what one was until a couple years ago. In fact, no attention at all was spent examining how I actually recruited because…… no one cared. All that mattered was that the candidates appeared, and enabled by the job boards, they always did.

2. Recruiters Recruited Only On Sales Ability

Job boards also affected how we recruited ourselves. Our ‘Resourcers’ aren’t really specialist finders-of-candidates; they are trainee sales agents and recruited for their potential to bring in business, rather than there ability to deliver on it. We do not test for the skills required for the latter – investigative, analytic, methodological. We test on whether they can sell us a pen. The underlying assumption is that sourcing candidates is less important – nay, less skillful – than acquiring clients. I guess this was because we had the machinery of the job boards doing it for us. Over the past decade we have slowly weeded out true sourcing skills from the profession and become nearly a 100% sales orientated in skill-set and culture, trading on our ability not to deliver, but on our ability to ‘outsell’ the competition.

3. Solution To Failure? Sell More!

The response from recruitment agencies on failing to deliver on a requisition is either to ‘educate the client’ on the impossible role that they have commissioned, or strengthen ‘expectation management’ up front or ‘qualify out’ and simply move on to another client with an easier role to fill. No thought is ever given as to whether the delivery needs to be examined. Myopically looking for the results from job boards activity, we have become tunnel visioned and if job board genie does not provide, it means that it can’t be there. Inevitably, the consequence of this relentless focus on client management rather than, say, actually recruiting people, has an enormous impact on the reputation of the entire industry. This has generated a hostility to recruitment agents that is now unfortunately as deeply embedded in the clients, as the sales orientation is in recruiters. The two are, of course, mutually reinforcing forces.

Where Are We Now?

Job boards were, and are, great. There is no question that they have been a boon to our industry, and have helped recruiters make a lot more money than they otherwise might have done. However, by allowing ourselves to become dependent on them – and remodelling our businesses on that dependency – we have removed our ability to do what we once did best: find people.

This loss, along with our predilection of trying to sell ourselves out of trouble, will have profound consequences for an industry coping with an depressed economy and as yet unable to articulate a coherent response to the continuing growth of non agency hiring channels. If all you can do is sell, what value do you truly add?

How are you?

It’s been a while and I’m sorry that I haven’t been in touch. You may remember me as the guy who always did enough not to get fired in the bad years, yet never quite enough to make it to the company sponsored all expenses, holiday-for-the-top-billers in the great years.

I’ve been away. On a deep dive into the social unknown. On my way down, I encountered many strange things. I have witnessed the horrors of Chatroulette and seen the wonders of Augmented Reality. I have lost hours and days throwing cartoon pigs at cartoon walls, and I have moved from apprentice, to evangelist, to cynic and back again more times than I can remember. But I want to you know one thing. Throughout it all, I never forgot about you.

I have returned and instead of bearing gifts, I bring a letter. For the time I’ve spent away from recruitment has given me thoughts enough to write one. And it’s also made me poor, so this is best I can afford.

Here’s what I think I’ve found out.

1. We’ve Got To Move To Vertical Markets

Yeah, I know. It’s hard to turn away business. It’s not…………natural for us Natural Born Salespeople. But here’s the thing: employers and candidates have all these new ways of talking to each other, and increasingly, they’re doing it before reaching for the phone and talking to you. Don’t take this the wrong way – they still like you – but you cost money, we’re in a recession and they need to cut budget. So the generalist, do-everything-because-I-can kind of recruiter is on his way out. Your business will shrink if you depend only on relationships. So, over to the vertical you go – become a specialist in the impossible-to-find, trade on a unique skillset, get to know that market better than any social network and you’ll be just fine. In fact, become the super connector of that market and you’ll be more than just fine. You’ll be fucking rich, my friend.

2. Stop Cold Calling

I’ve made you angry now. I can feel it in my water. But before you scroll down to the comment’s section and tell me that I only say that because I’m a loser who could never cold call in the first place, let me first say this: I get it that it’s a telephone based job. And I absolutely get it that you’re better at it than me. But see, this is not about you and me. This about what’s going on out there. And out there, is too much information, competing for not enough time. That’s forcing people to choose what types of interruption they deal with, and which ones they don’t. Taking a phone call from an unsolicited and unidentified caller – as thrilling as it once was – is now a high risk move for a person who already does not enough time in the day. And so she either won’t pick up, or will be pissed off with you when she does. Eerily reminiscent of my last girlfriend, as it happens. Understand this: I’m not saying ‘don’t use the phone’ – that would be like saying ‘stop using porn’. What I am saying, is, use it in a different way (kind of like porn) – to deepen relationships already initiated by other means. Which brings me onto

3. Initiating Relationships By Other Means.

Someone in a uniform once taught me that stalking is bad. But the uniform, his buddies, and Her Majesty’s legal system don’t know recruitment like I do. You see, stalking is good so long as it’s online and you’re in recruitment. And social media has been an information bonanza for us recruiter/stalkers. It’s like God went to our community and said, ‘Guys, I’ve been too hard on you all these years, I’m sorry. Here, have some compensation. Its called social media. You’ll love it’. This is personal information that people have voluntarily put online so that their friends can search for it and find it. It’s recruitment gold. Now here’s the thing: most of the time we find this stuff out, we reach for the phone and try to parlay some of those social nuggets into a sales pitch delivered over the phone. Which is a shame, because you could have just contacted that person on the network where you found that information in the first place. Or better still, parlay that information from one social network, say Twitter, into a communication trope on another, say, LinkedIn. They usually don’t know what hit them. Trust me: it’s like you really are their friend. So, if you’re good at dialing 9, there’s a good chance you’ll be good at sending a tweet. It’s really the same thing, but you’re playing with better percentages, and this time, you’ve got their ego on your side.

4. We’ve Got To Dual Desk

Ah, the happy days of being a generalist recruiter on a booming permanent market. Sit tight on a few great relationships and watch those requirements come rolling in, £10K at a time. Been a couple years since that happened though, right? Contract is trending against Permanent everywhere, as companies get edgy about overheads and employees get comfortable with being flexible with their working time. Run a single desk and you are putting all your eggs in one basket; running a single, permanent-only desk, and your eggs are already cooked. I’m not saying that Permanent is dead, only that you soon will be if that’s the only thing you do. Unless, of course, you’re already a specialist super connector of the impossible-to-find, in which case, you’re on a yacht somewhere and only doing this for the shits and giggles

5. Get Away From The Big Boys

As my mother used to say……no wait, that’s a different story. Big companies. Big Brands. It’s getting tough to make money from those guys. Sure, it’s sexier to be recruiting for Zappos than it is for McCompany Insurance Ltd, but the truth is, the bigger the brand, the bigger the pressure it is for them to go direct. This is because recruitment is now more than just recruitment; it’s about marketing, and ideas like ‘candidate experience’ and ‘employer branding’ are topics du jour for HR looking to earn brownie points from the corporate masters who dole them out. Someone must have realised that bad press really does travel a lot farther these days. Something bad happens and before you know it, some little mo-fo’s tweeting about this or posting about that. And companies that depend on brand can’t afford to have bad recruitment giving them bad press. So it’s goodbye big boys, hello everyone else. Mother would be proud.

I could go on, but I think I’ve written enough to show that I care. It’s been tough for me these last two years – I’ve missed you and I’ve been concerned for you and your number. I really hope you make it, get to go on that holiday, and maybe – in between the hookers and the cocaine – find the time to write back one day.

Your friend

Wise Man Say

This post was written in homage to the No27 educational resource on the Internets, Cracked.com.

1. He won’t return my calls

Behaviour
You’ve called several times, tried his mobile and direct line and left several voicemails but there has been no word of response from your recruitment agent.

What’s going on?
Probably not much. In this case, the most obvious answer is likely to be the real one – he has simply nothing to tell you. The first call a recruiter makes is designed to achieve one objective – to secure your endorsement on his representation of you. It may have felt like the start of a beautiful relationship, but that’s the sugar coat all recruiters are trained to put onto any candidate sourcing call. Be clear on the real purpose of that call – it was basically to get you to say, ‘Yes, please send my CV to your client, Mr Agent’. Once you’ve conceded this, there is no reason for him to contact you again until there is progress of some sort in whatever scheme he’s got you up for.

What should you do now?
Don’t panic and leave it alone. Chasing recruiters rarely works and it might end up to be counter productive. You have no leverage and cannot do much other than get increasingly frustrated if he won’t talk. Send him an email registering your continued interest, check it down to as another lead you actioned on your job search and move onto the next thing you’ve got to do.

2. She won’t see me

Behaviour
Your recruitment consultant does not seem to be enthusiastic about meeting you; you’ve heard its all about relationships, but every suggestion to meet has been met with apathy or an excuse why it can’t be done.

What’s going on?
There are two reasons why a recruiter won’t meet you; she may be prevented from doing so by company policy or she thinks that its not currently a good return to her investment in time. The first reason might sound implausible, but I can assure you that its common practice by many recruitment companies to prevent their consultants from doing anything that takes them away from the phone. The second reason will be based on how confident the recruiter feels that the hiring manager (her client, lest we don’t forget) will see her candidates. If she feels the chances are low, she will throw out the candidate interview from the process, hence no meeting with you.

What should I do now?
Follow the agents direction. There is no reason to be unhappy if the agent won’t meet; it simply tells you something about the agent & the company she works for (likely to be a high volume, ‘low touch’ recruiter) and on the type of recruitment process you’ve got yourself involved in (contingent, probably multiple agency). Arrange your hopes accordingly.

3. He wants me to call immediately after the interview

Behaviour
Your recruitment consultant is insistent on having you call him immediately after your interview with the employer organisation. In fact, his insistence is a more than a little annoying and its crossed your mind that it’s bordering on the pathological.

What’s going on?
Recruiters are information brokers and they become deeply uncomfortable when they find themselves in a position when that is no longer the case. Unless they are present at your employer interview (highly unlikely), this is precisely what happens when you meet with their client, your potential employer, at the interview stage – the broker has lost control over information which is crucial to his business. Hence, all recruiters are trained to close this information gap as soon as they can – typically by impressing on the job seeker of the urgent need to keep them updated on every development, as close to real time as possible.

What do I do now?
Do as he says. This is one the moments of the recruitment process where job seeker and agency interests are actually closely aligned. Certainly, there may be some satisfaction to be had by keeping an annoying agent waiting, but its really not in anyone’s interests to play games at this stage. Call him up and update him in full. The sooner you do this, the sooner you will get him working for you in securing you client feedback and moving the process along. As a further bonus, you’ll also be building on your reputation amongst agents as a reliable candidate – great for any future options that agent may have.

4. He’s taking an interest in all other opportunities I’m pursuing

Behaviour
Your recruitment agent has a high degree of interest in the other opportunities you’ve got in the pipeline, particularly ones not managed by him or his agency.

What’s going on?
Probably two things – ‘Candidate Risk Assessment’ and ‘Pulling New Business Leads’. A recruiter only makes money if his guy gets the job, with his client. It’s no good if you get a job with another employer who isn’t his client. In fact, that’s very bad as far as the recruiter is concerned, as he’s just wasted time, effort and opportunity cost in representing you, only to see you pull out of the process due to a competing offer he’s not managing. Recruiters are trained to assess of the risk that every candidate represents, hence the relentless interest on what other opportunities you have ongoing, and on what progress you are making on each of them. If he takes a more detailed interest – such as asking you who those other opportunities are with, and who indeed, the hiring managers are, he’s doubling up by also taking the opportunity of securing market intelligence for new business prospecting. He will almost certainly call these companies, offer his indispensable services, and more likely than not, submit other candidates in competition with you.

What do I do now?
Be polite, give enough information to preserve the relationship, but be clear on information you will not disclose. In this case, there is no harm in revealing that you are on the market and have opportunities, even some detail on where you are at with them. However, revealing the names of the those organisations, much less names of hiring managers, is not recommended.

5. I’ve been rejected but the recruiter won’t tell me why

1. Be Easily Contactable
That means mobile and email on the top of the first page. Putting this information anywhere else forces the recruiter to hunt for it within the document, and every additional second he spends doing this exercise increases the risk that he will give up and move on to the next CV on his list.

2. Be Conventional
Unless you are in a creative industry, its worth avoiding any kind of unnecessary formatting or design that could be considered gimmicky. That means backgrounds other than white, font colours other than black, any kind of non standard font, unconventional bullet points and so on. There is a difference between making your CV stand out, and making it look wierd. Unconventional formatting does the latter and will almost certainly lead to the delete pile.

3. Be Categorical
Of course, you are a multi talented, multi dimensional professional, but to pass the CV scan you need to be easily categorised into a role a recruiter understands. Strange as it may sound, but you need to pigeon-hole yourself on the CV. If you are a Project Manager, the recruiter needs to understand this in 3 seconds of opening your CV, so make it obvious with your headings, the language you use and skills you list.

4. Be Easy On The Eye
Bullet points were invented for a reason – use them. Writing blocks of text forces the recruiter to actually read – remember that’s not what that’s not what he wants to do. It’s time consuming to pick out those key elements within a block of text more than 5-6 lines long. Make a clear, related points within short paragraphs (try for 3-4 lines) and follow up with subheadings and bullets if you need to expand upon it.

5. Be Brief
A recruiter can tell how long your CV is as soon as the document is open. Keep your CV to two pages if you can, four pages at an absolute maximum. Anything over that and the recruiter will close it down before they even begin to read.

There is a somewhat unpalatable rule of thumb in all of this; don’t make the recruiter work. Your best interests are served if you make as easy as possible for the recruiter to understand your CV and do so in 3 seconds or less.

1. Complete profile
A recruiter will not waste time contacting you if they think you are a dormant account holder on LinkedIn and there is no surer indicator of this than an incomplete profile. Whether its the absence of a profile photo, incomplete work history or few connections, an incomplete profile sends one very clear message – you don’t use LinkedIn often enough for it to be a viable method of communication with you. The fact that this may or may not be true is irrelevant – you represent a risk of being a waste of time and that will be enough for the recruiter to skip to the next profile.

2. Job Title
Due to the limited boolean search capacity of LinkedIn, searching by Job Title is a far more common search technique than is the case with Online Job Boards or proprietary recruitment databases. What this means for job seekers is straightforward – not only do you need to have Job Titles in your work summary, but they should be aligned as closely as you can to industry standard nomenclature. Avoid using esoteric language or grandiose titles that don’t reflect the actualite – don’t let corporate narcissism or personal vanity damage your chances of appearing in search results relevant to you.

3. Location
As a formerly US centric networking tool, UK recruiters have been quick to learn to use the Location filter to generate only UK based profiles. This remains an essential part of the profile to get right. Without a country category or a postcode, you will end up being lost from searches as recruiters almost always recruit against geography and use the Location or promixity filter to do so. Furthermore, with geolocation likely to become the next big thing in social media (and social recruiting), it is essential that this is not overlooked as you complete your profile.

4. Company Name
The norms of recruitment have changed. The era of excessive privacy, cloak and dagger levels of subterfuge, and of headhunters behaving like MI5 agents is over. Not revealing the name of your employer on your LinkedIn profile might have been something you would do 10 years ago, but today it is anachronistic and counter productive from what you are hoping to achieve by being on LinkedIn. Company Name comes second only to Job Title as a search field for recruiters – you’re guaranteeing that you will be missing from searches if you do not add your company name where it should be.